Beginning Jan. 10, Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library will host Making Sense of the American Civil War, a scholar-led reading and discussion program. This program is organized as a five-part series of conversations that aim to get below the surface of familiar stories about the Civil War battles to explore the complex challenges brought on by the war.

The conversation begins with Geraldine Brooks’ novel March, a meditation on America as it faces the plague of war. Brooks tells its story through the character of Reverend March, the father from Louisa May Alcott’s beloved Little Women. The novel compares fiction and firsthand testimony from Alcott herself to illuminate the challenges war presents to individuals’ beliefs.